Update From the Team

This has been an interesting week: It hasn’t been a great experience for you nor for us and we apologize. Let’s review, as sort of a retrospective.

We released the new version of the site on Monday which started off poorly, being overshadowed by two issues not picked up during the closed beta: 1) DNS issues when deploying to the main domain, 2) We deployed to woefully insufficient hardware which caused slowness and generally making the site unusable. This isn’t to ignore the other issues we have been seeing, but they took the main stage. The good news is, we’ve fixed both large issues.

One of the main changes, apart from our temporary UI, is that we did a data migration to PostgreSQL from SimpleDB which will afford us a lot better control over the integrity of the data going forward. We expected to see some outliers on the data and we’re prepared to continue fixing the data as time goes on. In this migration, we’ve got quite a few issues but most glaringly, we discovered about 114 users who have duplicate email address accounts. We’re in the process of fixing this and if you were affected (e.g. not seeing your cellar data), you may see it resolved. There are some users who we still need to sort through and we’ll be in contact as we didn’t know which data to keep.

Also, for those of you who signed in with both email and Twitter accounts on the last site, you were given multiple cellars. We’ve changed the data schema behind the scenes so we can link these two authentication types together to a single cellar. Let us know via email (team@cellarhq.com), and we’ll merge your accounts together into one cellar.

Data cleanup will be an on-going effort, so if you see an issue let us know and we’ll work to fix it. We have all the old data, so we can recover anything you see as wrong.

Going forward, we’re going to continue working on quality and improving the experience and here’s what we’ve done this week:

On-listed a couple of our friends to help fix bugs, as well as help fix our user experience. No one is making money on this site, including Kyle and I, so we are greatly appreciative of them offering to help.

We’ll continue make improvements, changes and fixes based on your feedback, as well as continue to add to our test suite so that reliability continues to strengthen. We have fantastic monitoring on the site, so we’re able to see exactly what’s going wrong with reported and unreported issues, which we turn around and build tests for.

As for feature requests, we’re going to continue focusing on improving reliability and fixing the user experience, but at the same time we will be working on Import & Export functionality.

Thanks everyone for being a part of this community and showing such passion for the website; we relish the opportunity to evolve this into an excellent product to match and exceed your expectations.